Human Psyche: Brain, Mind, and Theories

Posted on Mar 1, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

The Brain and the Human Psyche

The brain is essential to explaining the workings of the human psyche. There are three main types of theories:

  • Materialist Monism: Supports only a material reality.
  • Dualism: Posits that in addition to the matter of the body, there is a separate, non-physical principle. It cannot explain human action without a bypass mechanism.
  • Other Theories: Attempt to go beyond materialism and dualism.

Monistic Theories

  • Physicalism: Mental activities are merely physicochemical processes.
  • Emergentist Materialism: Considers that the mental is not reducible to the physical, but emerges from the physical in an evolutionary process.

Dualistic Theories

  • Platonic Dualism: A compound of body and soul; the soul is immortal and immaterial and existed before joining the body, which is material and mortal.
  • Hylomorphism (Aristotle): Soul and body are two complementary and inseparable principles. Matter cannot exist without a particular form; the body is the material, and the soul is the substantial form of the human being.
  • Cartesian Dualism (Descartes): A radical dualism stating that the human being is composed of two completely different substances (an extensive and a thinking one).
  • Interactionist Dualism: Mind and brain are two different realities. Some events demand a self-conscious mind; the brain is insufficient to account for mental phenomena.

Beyond Monism and Dualism

  • Emergentist Interactionism: Affirms the existence of mental acts and that the mind is an evolutionary product of the brain. Not everything real must be material. There are three worlds:
    1. Observable physical bodies (the only existing world for materialists).
    2. States of mind.
    3. All products of the human mind.
  • Structuralism: Describes the relationship between the physical and mental. The brain has a dynamic structure; some acts depend on the reliable functioning of a brain region, and others can only be explained by the functioning of the whole.

Types of Reason

  • Theoretical Reason: We use our rational capacity to reach the truth.
  • Practical Reason: We use our rational capacity to achieve happiness.
  • Historical Reason: Used to learn, think about, and explain history.
  • Vital Reason (José Ortega y Gasset): A model of reason.
  • Instrumental Reason: Technically aspires to dominate natural processes to meet our needs.
  • Communicative Reason: The root of the difficulties of Luhmann’s sociological theory.

Concepts of the Human Being

  • Individual Substance: The human being is in the hands of fate, subsisting in himself and not in another.
  • Rational Nature: The human being is part of nature, endowed with self-consciousness, will, and sociability.
  • Mounier’s Proposals: Embodied existence, communication, probation, commitment, critical capacity, eminent dignity, closeness, and friendship.

Morality, Freedom, and Determinism

Morality involves imagining different possibilities, assessing, and acting. Immoral is a performance contrary to morality. Amoral refers to people acting automatically.

External freedom is the ability to move and act as we see fit, within the limits allowed by the laws and customs of the country. It involves internal freedom, which is the freedom to decide for oneself on the issues that affect us, the freedom to *want* one thing or another.

Determinism is a philosophical doctrine holding that any physical event, including thought and human actions, is causally determined by an unbreakable chain of cause and consequence. Conditioning is a procedure that establishes certain conditions of stimulus control.

Types of Determinism

  • Cosmological Determinism: Our actions respond to a predetermined plan.
  • Theological Determinism: If God knows everything, it is because He has given all things their purpose; therefore, God is the cause of human actions.
  • Scientific Determinism:
    • Physicalist Monism: Reduces the material universe and the movements of bodies to mechanical movement.
    • Physiological Determinism: What we call free acts are actually elaborate conditioned reflexes.
    • Psychoanalytic Determinism: Understands human action as driven by the unconscious.